First Gravedigger by Barbara Paul Page A

so inflexible. France had something to offer I just couldn’t get enough of: its chairs. My god, the chairs! Beautiful, exquisite pieces that delighted the eye and fed the soul. We took a few quick trips to Paris and other places, and I made some incredible buys. A Louis XIV walnut fauteuil dated 1680. An 1850 cane-seated papier-mâché chair inlaid with gilt and mother-of-pearl. A pair of Louis XV waxed beechwood chairs signed “Nagaret à Lyon.”
    But the biggest find was a High Gothic throne chair dating from the fifteenth century. The seat had been replaced sometime during the last century, but the cresting was intact and the bookfold paneling on the front and sides was original. It would complement without matching the grand English oak box chair Robin Coulter had bought for me from Mercer Gallery. I told Nedda what we could sell this one for, how much profit we’d realize on that one—all the time knowing most of them would end up in the house in Fox Chapel.
    Amazing how quickly one adjusts to spending large sums of money. My days of hustling Hepplewhites were over (thank god; I hate Hepplewhite). I could indulge what Nedda jokingly referred to as my chair fetish without worrying about the bank balance, without worrying about being caught.
    When we’d been there a little longer, I tried again. “It’s been six weeks now, Nedda. I was counting on staying only a month.”
    She gave me her innocent look. “Is that why we paid two months’ rent on the villa?”
    I’d been hoping she wouldn’t remember that. “When we were circling Orly, we talked about it. We agreed to stay a month.”
    â€œDid I agree to that? I seem to remember being told we’d stay a month.”
    â€œNedda, if I’m going to run the galleries, I ought to be back there doing it.”
    â€œRelax, Earl. The business isn’t going to collapse just because you’re not there. Or is that what you’re afraid of?”
    I didn’t have a snappy comeback for that, so I let it drop. It wasn’t just Charlie Bates now; I was beginning to worry about the business a little too. I’d left Peg McAllister in charge and I knew she wouldn’t let anything happen. Still.
    We took a drive to Avignon; there was a showroom there I wanted to visit. The selection turned out to be disappointing—until I came to a chair that made me stop dead in utter astonishment.
    It wasn’t French. Never in their most manic moments had the French produced anything like that chair. No, the English were going to have to take the blame for this one. It was a Regency armchair built by someone who’d flipped his lid over a fad of the times. The Regency period was a time of extremes—simplicity was fashionable but excess was admired once in a while in relief. The man who’d made this chair had opted for the latter. English Regency was the more graceful counterpart of the trend-setting French Empire style—the last two consistent styles before nineteenth-century mass production, mass imitation. Both English and French styles went ape on occasion, trying to outdo each other in ornamentation that caught a popular rage of the times: a fascination with Egypt and all things Egyptian.
    So what we had here was an English Regency Egyptian chair that must have been an elaborate imitation of a French Empire Egyptian chair. A mishmash. I couldn’t tell at first glance what kind of wood had been used; every visible inch of it had been either gilded or painted black. Sphinx-head handgrips, lion-paw feet, other ornamentation in the form of lotus leaves, scrollwork, sun-and-pyramid, chimeras, crossed whip and scepter, ankhs, winged lions, scarabs, ostrich feathers, wheat sheaves. The chair that had everything. Even the three-inch spindles gratuitously inserted into the shortened back were delicately carved representations of cats—sacred ones, no doubt. Incredible, utterly